In partnership with
There’s a well-known metaphor in engineering leadership written by Charity Majors about the “pendulum” swinging between being an individual contributor and becoming a manager. For years, it’s been the default framework for explaining that it’s normal to move between the two and build a career that isn’t strictly linear. (I reference this article at least once a week.)
The pendulum was useful. But the world around it has changed.
Over the past several years, the boundary between IC and manager has blurred so much that the old binary model barely fits anymore. Hybrid responsibilities have become the norm. AI has shifted what “technical work” even looks like. And expectations for both leaders and ICs have expanded far beyond what the original metaphor assumed.
Most of us aren’t swinging back and forth between two discrete identities.
We’re living in the middle.
And if we don’t update the model, we’ll keep pretending people are in roles that no longer exist.
The job has changed, but the labels stayed the same
The pendulum has historically consisted of two distinct modes: “hands-on technical work” and “people leadership.” But modern engineering leadership isn’t shaped like that. The work today demands a mix of technical reasoning, systems thinking, product intuition, and human leadership—even when someone’s title suggests otherwise. The old categories don’t describe the actual shape of the job anymore; they describe an era most of us no longer work in.
Senior IC work is already leadership
A Staff or Principal engineer spends a huge portion of their time coordinating across teams, guiding architecture, mentoring others, clarifying product intent, managing ambiguity, and spotting risks before anyone else sees them, which is often why they’re the ones expected to surface those risks in the first place. They may not manage people, but they lead constantly. This means these ICs have much greater influence than before (including at the Senior level!), and it can change the dynamics of who needs to make the final decision.
The Staff role at most companies is fundamentally different from being a Senior engineer (as it should be), and it’s a shift that requires a different identity, mindset, and set of expectations. It’s also why promotions into Staff+ roles often feel like a change in job type, not just job level.
Senior management requires real technical fluency
Meanwhile, engineering managers and directors can’t operate purely as “people managers” anymore. They’re expected to understand complex systems, evaluate tradeoffs, shape technical strategy, interpret data and incidents, and provide clarity about feasibility and priorities. If they don’t have enough technical grounding, the entire system suffers. And as teams scale, the cost of a manager who can’t follow technical reasoning becomes a drag the team has to carry.
AI has compressed the distance between building and leading
Leaders can now validate assumptions, explore design directions, parse logs, and reason about architecture faster than ever. ICs can operate at a higher strategic level without getting bogged down in mechanical work. Both roles have moved toward the center because AI has shifted what “hands-on” even means. You can be technical today without being deep in code every hour of the day.
Remote work turned everyone into alignment owners
Distributed teams require a level of communication, documentation, and cross-functional reasoning that used to live mostly in the manager role. Today, senior ICs routinely lead alignment at scale. Conversely, managers often work farther upstream in technical decision-making than ever before. Remote work didn’t just change how we collaborate—it changed who carries the burden of coordination.
The job simply isn’t binary anymore.
A thank you from this week’s sponsor:
Join over 4 million Americans who start their day with 1440 – your daily digest for unbiased, fact-centric news. From politics to sports, we cover it all by analyzing over 100 sources. Our concise, 5-minute read lands in your inbox each morning at no cost. Experience news without the noise; let 1440 help you make up your own mind. Sign up now and invite your friends and family to be part of the informed.
The hybrid identity
Once you stop forcing roles into the IC/manager dichotomy, you can see the pattern that’s actually emerged: the hybrid leader.
A hybrid leader blends four modes of work:
Technical reasoning – understanding how the system works and why decisions matter
Systems leadership – shaping processes, decisions, alignment, and execution across teams
People development – coaching, supporting, and elevating others, regardless of reporting lines
Product and strategic thinking – connecting technical decisions to customer value and business impact
The mix varies from company to company, and even from quarter to quarter. But the reality is the same: most senior roles today sit squarely in the middle. A Staff engineer might spend Monday deep in architecture reviews, Tuesday partnering with product on strategy, Wednesday mentoring an early-career engineer, and Thursday coordinating with design and data to untangle a cross-team dependency. No single label captures that.
This is where much of the tension in tech comes from—people are working in a hybrid environment with non-hybrid titles and expectations.
A quick but important distinction: recognizing that the work is hybrid does not mean companies should create permanent hybrid IC–manager roles. Those roles almost always lead to unclear expectations, misaligned incentives, and hidden burnout. If an IC temporarily steps into people leadership to bridge a gap or transition into management, that’s different. But as a long-term structure, hybrid IC–EM roles muddy ownership and make accountability impossible. The goal is clarity, not blending. Hybrid work is inevitable; hybrid roles should be rare.
Career ladders lag behind how work actually happens, creating a confusing landscape for measuring performance
Someone can be called an “IC” yet spend their days leading strategy. Or be a “manager” who contributes to architecture. The mismatch makes people feel like they’re not doing their job “right,” even when they’re doing exactly what the role requires. This tension grows as responsibilities drift without the title or ladder changing to match.
Most ladders still force people to choose IC or manager even though the most valuable leaders blend both skillsets. Some companies still believe that the move from IC to Manager is a promotion. (It’s not. Please stop treating it as one. IC → EM is as much of a promotion as moving from Engineering → Product.) As a result, growth conversations become confusing and often frustrating. People end up optimizing for titles instead of optimizing for impact.
How do you measure someone who is simultaneously unblocking, strategizing, influencing, mentoring, and occasionally building? Companies rarely articulate expectations clearly, so leaders end up guessing. The hybrid role is often judged on invisible work, which makes it easy to undervalue or misunderstand.
Burnout looks different here
Hybrid roles require constant switching between cognitive modes. You might spend your morning reasoning about architecture, your afternoon aligning product and engineering, and your evening preparing for a performance conversation. It’s not the volume of work that burns people out; it’s the fragmentation. You never get to stay in one mental gear for long.
These challenges aren’t individual failures. They’re structural gaps.
The organizational cost of ignoring the hybrid shift
This is the part that often gets overlooked: the hybrid model isn’t just something individuals experience. Companies feel the consequences too.
When a highly capable hybrid IC moves fast, makes technical and product-aligned decisions, and navigates complexity well, a less technical manager can misinterpret that speed as recklessness. That reaction doesn’t come from incompetence. It comes from a lack of visibility and a lack of fluency. But it creates friction and breaks trust. It also discourages initiative, because ICs learn to shield decisions rather than surface them.
If hybrid ICs are expected to own technical strategy but managers don’t understand it well enough to support them, work slows down. Decisions get revisited. Projects get blocked. Teams hesitate because they don’t know who actually has authority. Even high-performing teams can get stuck when the people responsible for alignment can’t see the full picture.
Role ambiguity becomes a cultural problem
When titles don’t reflect actual responsibilities, teams rely on assumptions instead of clarity. That leads to duplicated work, missed handoffs, and breakdowns in ownership. Eventually the organization starts to normalize chaos because nobody knows what “good” looks like anymore.
At the center of it all, hybrid environments rely heavily on trust:
Trust that ICs are making sound decisions
Trust that managers can support work they don’t fully see
Trust that people are aligned even when operating independently
When managers can’t keep up with the technical or systems complexity of the work, that trust erodes, even if unintentionally.
This is why the hybrid era isn’t just a career model. It’s an organizational reality companies need to design around.
So where does the pendulum fit now?
The pendulum was an excellent way to normalize early-career transitions. It helped people understand that it’s okay to move between IC and management. It still serves that purpose.
But at senior levels, the pendulum misses more than it captures. It assumes discrete modes at a time when the most impactful leaders blend multiple modes every day. The pendulum explains how we used to think about career movement. The hybrid model explains how we work now.
Here’s one way to describe the roles we actually see in the industry today:
Technical Craft – deep system understanding, technical influence, mentorship
Systems Navigator – cross-team alignment, architecture guidance, decision-making at scale
People and Team Leader – developing people, shaping team culture, unblocking execution
Strategic Operator – connecting engineering, product, and business in ways that drive clarity
Most senior leaders operate in several of these modes, shifting fluidly depending on what the organization needs. This isn’t a deviation. It’s the role.
The pendulum helped us understand that engineering careers aren’t linear. It gave us language for transitions that felt confusing at the time. But as expectations evolve and the work itself becomes more intertwined, we need language that matches the world we’re actually working in. The hybrid era isn’t temporary. It’s the new normal.
Updating the model isn’t about rejecting the pendulum. It’s about recognizing that the work grew bigger than two categories. Hybrid roles need clarity. Hybrid leaders need support. And hybrid organizations need frameworks that reflect the complexity of how modern engineering actually gets done.
The pendulum may have gotten us here. But it’s not where we’re standing anymore.